January 13, 2013

The secret of writing good dialogue for your novel or screenplay

Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson said this about bad
movie dialogue:

“Bad movie dialogue speaks in complete sentences without any
overlapping or interruption, and avoids elliptical speech which is truer to how
people actually speak.”

Of course you don’t want to write dialogue exactly the way
people speak. The characters would come across as half-wits. If you are
up for an interesting experiment, record a normal conversation and transcribe
it. You’ll be amazed at the number of interruptions, sentences that change
direction mid-way or just trail off, and non sequiturs.

For examples of the other extreme watch a bad soap opera. In
these, characters tend to explain everything in complete sentences, tell another
character what that person would already know, and helpfully recap incidents
that took place in episodes the viewer might have missed.

What we’re aiming for is somewhere in the middle.

If you can find an image that can take the place of a long
speech, so much the better, whether you’re writing a novel or a screenplay. An example comes to mind from a TV movie
script I wrote some years ago. The protagonist goes into a bar and encounters a
teacher he’d admired when attending college, twenty years before. The teacher
looks down on his luck and is drunk. The protagonist asks him what happened.

In the first draft I gave the teacher a long speech about how
he’d turned to alcohol and at first it seemed to help him but then he lost
control of it, etc.

In the second draft I just have him lift his shot glass and
say, “This. This is what happened.” Now that I think of it, maybe he didn't need to say even that.

(For more tips on writing good dialogue, creating vivid characters, and crafting strong plots, see "Your Creative Writing Masterclass," published by Nicholas Brealey and available now from Amazon or your other favorite book seller.)

Comments

Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson said this about bad
movie dialogue:

“Bad movie dialogue speaks in complete sentences without any
overlapping or interruption, and avoids elliptical speech which is truer to how
people actually speak.”

Of course you don’t want to write dialogue exactly the way
people speak. The characters would come across as half-wits. If you are
up for an interesting experiment, record a normal conversation and transcribe
it. You’ll be amazed at the number of interruptions, sentences that change
direction mid-way or just trail off, and non sequiturs.

For examples of the other extreme watch a bad soap opera. In
these, characters tend to explain everything in complete sentences, tell another
character what that person would already know, and helpfully recap incidents
that took place in episodes the viewer might have missed.

What we’re aiming for is somewhere in the middle.

If you can find an image that can take the place of a long
speech, so much the better, whether you’re writing a novel or a screenplay. An example comes to mind from a TV movie
script I wrote some years ago. The protagonist goes into a bar and encounters a
teacher he’d admired when attending college, twenty years before. The teacher
looks down on his luck and is drunk. The protagonist asks him what happened.

In the first draft I gave the teacher a long speech about how
he’d turned to alcohol and at first it seemed to help him but then he lost
control of it, etc.

In the second draft I just have him lift his shot glass and
say, “This. This is what happened.” Now that I think of it, maybe he didn't need to say even that.

(For more tips on writing good dialogue, creating vivid characters, and crafting strong plots, see "Your Creative Writing Masterclass," published by Nicholas Brealey and available now from Amazon or your other favorite book seller.)